Well, I hear something else. It's the Hug Plane, and it's coming in for a landing.

Sunday, June 29

Goodbye, Uga VI.

Not everyone will understand this -- though, hopefully, even non-UGA football fans will -- but as both a dog fan and a Dawg fan, I almost cried a little upon reading this morning that Uga VI, the sixth in Georgia's lineage of English bulldog mascots, died Friday night of congestive heart failure at the age of nine. Which I guess is actually 63.

His first season included a humiliating loss to Auburn and the controversial overtime loss to Georgia Tech (both recounted to some level of ragey detail here); his final season included an overtime win at Alabama, a thrilling upset in the Cocktail Party, our seventh straight win over Tech, and a ripping good blowout over Hawaii in the Sugar Bowl. It's interesting to look back on just how much the football program changed -- the vast majority of it for the better -- during his "reign."

Anyway, as someone who is now a dog owner himself and who nearly ended up in the fetal position the last time one of his Bostons had to go in for what is actually a fairly common knee surgery, my condolences are with the Seiler family today. Uga VI was a damn good dawg indeed, but we're confident the next one will be too.

7 comments:

I confess to not being a UGA fan Doug (nothing against UGA, I'm just not really a sports person period), but our fur friends are very dear to me and so I share in your grief. He looks just precious and so proud. Maybe he'll get to come back and do it again someday... I like to think that.

We lost our English Bulldog last November to "old age" and still find ourselves thinking of him and missing his being with us. Duncan was sixty five pounds of white furred conpanionship and he will be in our hearts always. Heartfelt condolensces to the Seiler family from ours.

I know it's sad that the dog has died and so on but he had a great life for the equivalent of 63 years. I'm sure he was given better care than many of America's poor/children/homeless/mentally ill/veterans/abused...do I need to keep going on? Not to mention better care than those poor animals who, day after day, sit on death row just waiting in vain to be adopted before their time's up. So it IS sad when a living, breathing creature loses its life but let's be honest here, this dog had a 'dog's life.' I'm more hurt at the 230 dogs put down by the Birmingham Humane Society over the last couple of weeks. Not to mention the countless cats and kittens, which I've heard can number in the thousands per month. Sorry, Doug.

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